Adjusting Your Time Scale and Working With Real Time

All of this musical notationkeys and measures and temposis great for the musically inclined, but Jennifer has had no musical training. All she wants is a loop that will run as long as her video. She knows her time-lapse video (from Lesson 6) is 1 minute long. How does that translate into measures?

Luckily, no math is required. At the bottom of the workspace is a digital counter.

The music note to the left of the numbers indicates that the counter and the ruler across the top of the workspace are displaying musical measurement. For more video-related applications of your music, change the counter and workspace ruler to display absolute time by clicking the note.

The note becomes a clock, and the display changes to show hours, minutes, seconds, and thousandths of a secondperhaps more accuracy than you need. Now, by positioning the playhead in your music, you can see how long your music is runningor where you are within a piece of music.

Note

When you loop a bit of your music, the counter restarts at 0the beginning of the loopno matter how many times the loop repeats.

Measures do not consistently relate to elapsed time in different pieces of music. As you build your music and the length of your song increases, you may need to see more duration of your tracks at a glance.

The Zoom control for the workspace is (somewhat cryptically) nestled at the bottom of the Tracks column.

Drag the knob to increase (or decrease) the time span represented on the right side of the workspace. Whenever there is more to see than what is shown in the window, the familiar Mac scroll bar is available along the bottom of the workspace.

The measurement of time is the ideal way to find events in your video and make them correspond to moments in your music. The easiest way to do that is to see your movie while you compose.